‘Soldiers Unknown’: Graphic novel spotlights Yurok experience in WWI

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Yurok Tribe member Robert Spott served as a message courier for the U.S. Army in France. He earned a Croix De Guerre (“Cross of War”) medal from the French government for his bravery in combat, which is the French equivalent of a U.S. Medal of Honor. - Courtesy of Chag Lowry

Yurok Tribe member Barry Phillips pictured in his U.S. Army attire between 1917 and 1918. - Courtesy of Chag Lowry

Yurok tribal member Walt McCovey Sr. (right) and Sgt. S. Stanton had been stationed at the U.S.-Mexico border prior to being shipped to fight overseas in World War I France in 1917. McCovey had written on the back of the photo, “We are some soldier boys.” - Courtesy of Chag Lowry

The cover of Eureka native Chag Lowry’s upcoming graphic novel “Soldiers Unknown” displays the headdress used in traditional Yurok tribal jump dances (top) contrasted by the Native American soldiers fighting in World War I France. - Art by Rahsan Ekedal

Though the terrible conflicts of World War I were thousands of miles away, thousands of Native American men including several from northern California joined the ranks of the U.S. military when the nation entered the war in 1917.

Eureka resident and historian Chag Lowry, 41, had often pondered how he could best convey the experiences and sacrifices of these native WWI veterans who now only live on through photographs and memories.

“How I ended up learning about these World War I guys was when I was doing work on World War II and Korea veterans and then they would bring out these pictures of their dad,” Lowry said. “This generation has all since passed away. The only way to tell their story is through the graphic novel.”

After a chance meeting, Lowry chose the medium of a graphic novel to kindle new life into these nearly century-old experiences for a new generation to learn from, choosing the title “Soldiers Unknown.”

“When we say ‘unknown soldier,’ we always talk about the individual person who did things and no one knows about them,” Lowry said. “We have a whole community, a whole culture of men who were soldiers unknown.”

From river to trench

About 6,000 Native American men throughout the nation were drafted into WWI despite most not being recognized as U.S. citizens at the time, with thousands more volunteering. In total, nearly 13,000 Native American men served in the U.S. military during the war, with about 650 of them having died. Among these soldiers were men from northern California’s Maidu, Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Paiute, Tolowa, Wiyot and Pit River cultures who served as soldiers, scouts, snipers and messengers. Lowry also had a personal connection, with his great, great uncles Thomas Reed and Walt McCovey Sr. having served in and survived the war. About 40 Yurok men served in the war, according to Lowry’s estimates.

While Lowry’s graphic novel will be a work of historic fiction, the battles and the experiences of these soldiers on both the battlefield and the home front is rooted in historic fact. The story focuses on three Yurok men from the village of Pecwan who are ripped from their home and culture to fight in a foreign war in 1917.

“It was in a period of six months to go from fishing on the Klamath River to fighting in the trenches in Western France,” Lowry said.

The three characters are placed into the 91st Infantry Division, which was known as the “Pine Tree Division” or the “Wild West Division” as it was mainly made up of West Coast men. Unlike black soldiers who had been segregated into their own divisions, the native men were integrated with all other soldiers. While Lowry said his novel is going to show some of the racial tensions that resulted from this mix of soldiers, he said that his interviews with native World War II and Korean War veterans who had fought under similar conditions showed that the horrors of battle created a connection that often dissolved cultural barriers.

“What I learned from all these interviews is there was also a tight bond that was created between the white guys and native guys because they were in the same shell hole, the same trench, faced the same kind of gap,” Lowry said. “That tends to equalize things really fast because you have to depend on the guy next to you, or you’re both dead. If you come through and if you live, that guy is your brother. It doesn’t matter what culture he is.”

The bulk of the graphic novel focuses on 10 days of the 91st Infantry Division’s involvement in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in France in 1918. During these 10 days, thousands of men in the 91st Division were injured or killed as old war strategies collided with the new wartime technologies of the early 20th century. Lowry said these men were “slaughtered” as they charged toward German machine gun lines, were bombarded by artillery shells, gas attacks and had dynamite dropped on them from the air.

Lowry’s works to draw parallels between life of the soldiers on the battlefield and the lives they left behind on the North Coast. Throughout the novel, the panels jump forward to a father and son in contemporary Pecwan who are discussing their grandfather’s experience in the war as they prepare for a 10-day jump dance ceremony.

“I found that to be something that was very significant; that you can have 10 days in this ceremony where we pray and connect for health for the balance of the world for good medicine,” Lowry said. “And then you also have this 10-day experience in this war, which was all about death and destruction and chaos and disorder.”

Lowry also hopes to illustrate how those native soldiers who were fortunate to walk away from the war with their lives still experienced losses when they returned home. In the end, many could not acclimate.

“In all these interviews that I did with these veterans who were also elders, a lot of the native men said that we descend from cultures where you cannot participate in ceremony if you take a life,” Lowry said. “So if you kill, you cannot be ceremony anymore for the rest of your life. I was always struck by that sort of sacrifice. That WWI generation of men, they had to kill to survive.

“That’s everything, that’s your cultural identity, that’s who you are as a person. If you lose that, if you sacrifice that, how do you move forward? How do you continue to live?”

These questions still apply to all veterans today, Lowry said.

Lowry often wondered why these native men chose to fight for a country that just a few decades earlier had worked to eradicate them as they expanded west. While Lowry could not ask the WWI vets themselves why they fought, their sons who had fought in WWII were able to answer.

“The homeland was attacked. They were patriots,” Lowry said. “They felt like this is our country, too. They also felt that their ancestral lands were in danger.”

Comic connection

While Lowry’s has a full-time job as the Humboldt Area Foundation Native Cultures Fund Program manager, he also has a flair for history and has self-published several books on tribal veterans with the support of local tribes. But he’s also a fan of comics, and could not resist checking out the WonderCon event in San Francisco five years ago while waiting for his flight home from a philanthropy conference. Once inside, Lowry saw a list of over 60 comic artists’ names posted on a large wall.

“So I thought whoever has the most unique sounding name that I read up there, that’s who I’ll go see,” Lowry said.

That’s how Lowry met Rahsan Ekedal who is currently producing all of the artwork for “Soldiers Unknown.”

Testing his abilities, Lowry asked Ekedal if he could draw one of his favorite DC Comics characters, Sgt. Rock, but with the character wearing his grandfather’s division patch and a belt patterned with his great grandmother’s favorite basket design. As the two men talked, Lowry found out Ekedal was raised in Southern Humboldt County in Briceland. The two men kept in touch until Lowry called him up a year ago proposing his idea for “Soldiers Unknown.”

Unlike some of the written history of the area which Lowry said is often segregated based on culture, the graphic novel will be written by a descendent of Maidu, Pit River and Yurok cultures and illustrated by a white man.

“This is an integrated piece of history that’s being published,” Lowry said. “We’re together on this culturally and socially.”

The graphic novel is expected to be completed by 2017. Lowry hopes to be able to travel to Europe for the centennial anniversary of the end of World War I in 2018 to represent the native soldiers. Lowry also has other dreams closer to home.

“I hope one day I sit at a table at a Comic Con. I will be on the other side,” he said, laughing.